SEO Doesn’t Have To Be Hard Just shot a video with our resident photographer Andrew Bartlett. Our conversation reminded me Search Engine Optimization doesn’t have to be so HARD.

Martin (Marty) Smith's insight:

After shooting a video with our resident photographer, Andrew Bartlett, I realized that SEO in a post Panda and Penguin world is easier than ever. Do the basics well, connect everything so Google knows YOU and be consistent and life is good.

Great article Marty. Wasn't long ago I'm talking to fellow website designer who said SEO is dead because of social media. I told him, funny how Google hasn't stopped telling website owners to do many of the items you cover in your article.

Spiders still need context Brian so you note to the designer was correct. Correct alt text has been a particular challenge for me with many designers. I prefer to have file names with keywords too, but good luck selling that idea to a designer (lol). M

Thanks to FedExSharing our Hero Marketing Haiku Deck last week with a group of Small to Medium Sized Businesses taught us how to tune the message. We noted how the TACTICS of competing with Amazon sparked real interest.

There are two components to competing with Amazon:

* 4Cs.* Everything Is Everything.

Four CsContent, Customers, Commerce and Community are the four pillars of creating successful online marketing. The Uber-Goal is creating sustainable online community, or a community growing faster than its costs.

You create online community by curating more than you create and moving from US to WE. Content is how you signal customers your site, brands and company GET IT and want to create community.

You know you've created community when following increases, heuristic measures such as time on site, pages viewed and bounce rates improve and your site is getting closer to the magical 50% returning 50% new visitor mix.

Everything Is EverythingWe've been struggling to explain how interconnected everything is these days. SEO, content marketing, content curation, email marketing, social media marketing and mobile marketing are working hand in glove now at increasingly faster pace. This more, faster, better loop means today's commerce is tomorrow's content, today's community is tomorrow's customer and round and round like a furious merry go round.

You win hearts, minds and loyalty today by understanding how to work the 4cs into a sustainable online community, a community of advocates wiling to sacrifice and support you, your brand and ideas.

Why Content Curtation Rocks SEO The slide deck from @Scoop.it about how content curation impacts SEO is an excellent SEO & content curation primer (embedded in the post), but let’s do a deeper dive to understand how content curation ROCKS SEO and every site's Uber-Goal of creating sustainable online community.

This Curagami post creates an interesting comparison between Oprah and Amazon. One knows how to create online community one doesn't. Both have great tips to share.

(From the article): HOW you say things matters. Go EASY and be FUN. If you are a control freak get someone else to write important pieces of your brand defining content such as: * About Page. * Ambassador Program Call To Action and Explanation page. * Terms (never let lawyers write this critical content). You might think the lawyers thing is strange, but if you let legal speak go on your site you are DEAD and much more DEAD than if you get sued. You are dead because no tribe will form. Without a tribe the web's natural and regular costs are unrecoverable. You MUST create online community or be eaten by the inevitable costs of creating and maintaining a website. You must curate to crate a tribe.

According to The Drum, they will account for 75% of the UK workforce in a decade. And with it a huge amount of the consumer spending in the UK. So what do millennials want? For many companies in the UK, it’s quite literally the billion-pound question.

As we work on creating a new tool, a tool capable of helping ecommerce merchants and content marketers validate their social media and content marketing. We’ve identified five community pillars and share them in this Curagami post:

Giving Tuesday? Tech Cures CancerWant to do something for me, you and everyone we know this #givingtuesday ? Your deductible contribution to UNC Lineberger and the Tech Cures Cancer Fund my family and I set up may be the magic money that cures cancer.

Content Director Should Rock Content MarketingI'm excited that th etalented @Scoop.itteam ( @Guillaume Decugis@Ally Greer@Marc Rougierand many others) are launching a new content curation tool called Content Director. As team Curagami shared in our 7 Reasons You Must Curate Content (http://shar.es/1ohSrO over 5,000 views now) knowing what content is making you money and why is a CSF (Critical Success Factor).